


You Brought Me Back Down

by troof



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, bridal carry, fight me, keith will hold shiro and never let him go, still dying from that s6
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-24 14:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14956352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troof/pseuds/troof
Summary: He doesn’t say anything as he holds Shiro against his chest, just promises himself that he will never let go. Shiro is here, in his arms, and he has never looked more beautiful.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> alternate universe in which this (as hilarious as it is) https://papersake.tumblr.com/post/174961250771/in-the-final-scene-of-s6-before-keith-says-theyre doesn't happen

_I died, Keith._

Keith had seen death before. Well, hadn’t seen it, actually. His dad told him he was leaving, as he so often did, just another routine trip, and after seven months of stopping in at the shack from the Garrison on weekends, he hadn’t returned. A stranger came to deliver the news, and he remembered thinking it strange because strangers didn’t visit.

As many times as he cried, and shot down the loneliness in his chest, he lived. This would have killed him.

He doesn’t say anything as he holds Shiro against his chest, just promises himself that he will never let go. If he has to, he doesn’t know if he could. He’s never seen Shiro look so...old. He can’t not see them: the white hair, the scar, the arm he had sliced off to sever his connection to Haggar--Keith thinks of how long Shiro was trapped in the astral plane and has to shove the thought out of his mind. How time passes is unknowable. But he does know that Shiro is here, in his arms, and he has never looked more beautiful. 

They’re going home, so Keith slides one arm under Shiro’s knees and one under his shoulders so his head can rest in the cradle of his elbow in order to carry him to Black. Shiro’s leg presses directly against the bruises on his forearm, but Keith arrives at Black with Shiro tucked into his chest, and he knows they could walk a great deal farther if they had to.

Black’s ramp is extended, and her jaw is overhead. Keith looks down at the steady rise and fall of Shiro’s chest, and lets out a breath he couldn’t help holding. 

He holds it every time he looks away from Shiro. It’s automatic.

The cockpit is no castle; inside, there’s ample headspace, room for seven people, and a pilot’s chair that he has to sit in to start up. As much as he would like to activate and fly Black telepathically, he’s not sure he could do that all the way back to Earth, so he hands Shiro over to Krolia for support. He is assured she cradles him just as tightly as he does, and once he pulls the right levers, Keith slides out of the pilot’s chair and takes Shiro back in his arms. Keith wouldn’t fit with Shiro across his lap.

There’s really no good place to sit, so Keith lets Krolia settle into the pilot’s seat while he takes the floor behind the base with Shiro drooping against him in slumber, position unchanged since Allura infused his spirit.

“Thank you,” Keith whispers. He knows that Krolia hears, because Galra have excellent hearing, but he can’t bring himself to raise his voice above a whisper right now. 

He doesn’t remember the buildup, or a lump in his throat, the pressure behind his eyes--but suddenly his face is wet, and a drop falls onto Shiro’s cheek. He goes to brush it away, but instead it turns into a caress that runs from Shiro’s cheekbone in an arc down to his chin. More droplets fall, and he brushes them away, too, trying not to apply too much pressure. Shiro slips down on his chest, and before he knows it Shiro’s face is cradled in his hands and he is pulling Shiro tighter into his chest, clutching his arm and entwining their fingers.

Shiro smells like gunpowder--burning hydrocarbons, the unique smell of being out in space too long, and Keith used to like it but it’s another reminder of how this body was so close to flaming out.

He hangs there in a state of panic until he realizes again that nothing is coming to take Shiro away. He’s known it since Shiro first awoke, but...it’s going to take time to get used to that idea. He takes a deep breath and releases Shiro minutely so he can once again see his face.

Keith wants to trace every feature with his fingertips, so he does. Feather-light, he touches eyes, nose, lips, and as he lingers here he knows it is an acknowledgement of what he wants, but he has wanted it for a long time, and he has finally come to terms with it and he is not ashamed. He wants him to know.

For the first time in a long time, he can just look. “You’re safe, Shiro,” whispers Keith for the third time into the silver hair of his sleeping paladin. He wants to keep looking forever, but no matter how much he ignores it, his limbs feel heavy and drugged as his body climbs down from the adrenaline. Eventually, he falls asleep, heart beating steadily next to Shiro’s.


	2. Sun and Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith knows that you don’t make confessions without consequences, and he is ready to handle every single one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I was writing this I had lots of questions about how much space the paladins now that they're living in their lions actually have, and I found this really informative article https://lionsandpilotsandbots.com/2017/06/02/lets-get-to-the-lions-voltron-legendary-defender/ about how the paladins get into their lions from the castle. It says there's actually a chamber behind the cockpit that is separated by double doors, and if you look at the 360 tour of Blue's cockpit on YouTube you can also see these double doors. So I would like to think that Keith and Shiro could have at least a little privacy if they found themselves in a dire situation.

Krolia insists they have to pry him out of his armor.

“You fought. There could be injuries beneath his armor that we can’t see.”

“I didn’t hurt him, I swear. Every time I swung, he blocked my knife with his bayard.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t hurt. There could be bleeding beneath the suit,” Krolia says, beginning to strip off the breastplate.

They try not to disturb him, but soon Keith sees that their efforts are for naught; Shiro is deep under, and won’t come awake from anything short of shaking.

Keith wonders if the Galra would have healing powers if they were less warlike, but he also considers the fact that more battles would mean more injuries and an increased need to heal, making this ability more likely, not less. Whatever the talent is, he doesn’t have it, but Shiro has been away for a long time. No spell can cure exhaustion like this.

Once Shiro’s chest is bare, they scan for lacerations; Keith feels for broken ribs. To his relief, the skin is still unbroken. It’s also unblemished.

Keith gasps. “What is it?” Krolia asks.

“He used to have scars here. From the arena, when he was captured by Zarkon. When Haggar cloned him, they must not have been replicated.”

Krolia takes one look and says that he will appreciate having those gone, and Keith takes issue.

“Those scars were a part of him. There was nothing wrong with having them in the first place.”

Keith quickly examines the groin for dried blood that would indicate a damaged femoral artery and scans the full body again for broken bones. He finds nothing besides the missing arm.

“I’m not saying there was. Obviously there was nothing wrong with him. Scars are noble; I have them too. But that arena...” She shakes her head. Keith pauses in shimmying the spacesuit back up Shiro’s torso to look up at Krolia, and she continues working until Shiro is clothed and Keith pulls him possessively into his lap. 

Keith’s mouth drops open and he closes it. “You saw Shiro fight?” 

“I saw several fights, I don’t know if I saw him. The fights are very popular. It has been less so since Zarkon neared the end of his reign, but I was called back to report after a mission. I don’t enjoy them, but it would have seemed strange not to go.”

“What creatures were in the fights you saw? Did you see any humans?”

Krolia pauses, and presses her thumb to her lips. “Yes. They called him ‘Champion.’ I didn’t recognize him from his face at first, but that arm is unmistakable.”

“Shiro never wanted to forget,” Keith says after a while. “He hated what he had done, and he wanted to remember the pain that was caused when he killed. When he looked at the scars, he could remember all the prisoners who didn’t make it out, and count himself lucky. Or cursed.”

Krolia reaches over and brushes her fingers over the tips of Shiro’s hair. “I am sorry,” she says, and they lapse into silence.

Shiro’s breathing is normal. Krolia confesses that she will do anything in her power to help care for him. He hates that his mom has seen Shiro in a gladiator pit. Keith doesn’t want to share him at first, but then he realizes he is lucky to have a helping hand because he doesn’t know everything and he can’t be awake all the time. They sleep in shifts, and Krolia comes over to place a hand on Shiro’s forehead at one point, ensuring that he’s not running a fever.

Shiro sleeps for about a day on Earth. Periodically, Keith has to get up and stretch his legs, but he is back by Shiro’s side when he opens his eyes, a shade of amber he’s not used to.

“Keith,” Shiro says, voice hoarse from disuse.

Striker pads over to give Shiro’s nose a lick. Shiro grunts. “Who’s this?”

“That’s Striker. It’s a long story.”

“I like long stories.”

“How are you feeling, first?” Keith and his mother ask this last question in unison while Shiro weakly ruffles Striker’s fur, because this is the important thing, beyond catching up.

“Wanna sleep.” Shiro’s eyes close and his head lolls to the side before Keith cradles it in his hand. Keith had his hopes up here, but it looks like they are being dashed.

“He’s tired.”

“He probably will be, for a long time. He’s been through a lot,” says Krolia.

“Too much.”

“Does anything hurt?” Keith asks. He receives no response. Shiro is out, just like he thought. He tries again the next time Shiro wakes.

“Does anything hurt? Shiro?”

“Hi, Keith,” he gets in response.

“Hello, Shiro.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re headed back to Earth,” Keith says in a tone that sounds like it should have sweetheart at the end, but he hasn’t gotten there yet. Shiro smiles and closes his eyes again, and lets himself fall back on Keith’s lap, but he is not asleep. Keith chuckles and places a hand over his chest.

It’s Krolia that tells him the story of how they met Striker in the end, along with the story of how they became stuck on a whale in order to find their way back to Voltron. 

“Keith saved him actually, from a predator crab that was hunting him down.”

“I tried to teach him to fetch, but he’s not that kind of dog.” 

“What kind of dog is he?”

“We have yet to find out.”

Krolia then pries food out of the supply crates they brought along and packed in each lion so each of them can have dinner, but Shiro refuses, claiming that he isn’t hungry. Instead, he spends several minutes splaying his fingers and rotating his arm in the light, watching the photons bounce off instead of cut through, and touching things to prove that they’re really there.

To his credit, the food isn’t appetizing, either. Keith holds up a yellow cube sealed in a plastic bag, and looks at the label written in Altean. He guesses Altean survival foods follow the same standards as Earth’s.

Shiro sits up on his own. “It’s weird, actually. It’s been awhile, but I can still feel that this isn’t my body.”

“You’ve been on the astral plane for a year. It makes sense that you would feel disconnected. Give it time,” says Krolia.

“I know, but..it’s still weird.”

“Do you think you’d feel better if you moved around?” Keith asks.

Shiro nods. “I don’t know if I can, though.”

“Here,” Keith says, slinging Shiro’s left arm over his shoulder and getting his feet under him. He helps Shiro push up and steadies him with his other hand when he pitches forward. 

The two of them walk around Black’s cockpit together, and by the time they have made one round, Shiro has retrieved his balance again. He walks in front of the dashboard, trailing his hand along the controls, and when he finishes, he leans against it, gazing out the window. 

“The stars are beautiful tonight,” Shiro remarks. He tries to cross his arms but forgets there’s nothing there, so his left arm slides back down his chest.

“I could get out the blankets, and we could watch them together,” suggests Keith.

Then he stumbles, and Keith almost isn’t close enough to catch him. 

“Shiro!” 

But he does.

“It’s okay, I’ve got it.” Keith lets go, and Shiro’s knees buckle and he falls to the floor. He bites his lip, but Shiro tries again and stands. Keith lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, and Krolia does too. It’s slow, but they’re making progress.

“Well, Black’s glad to have me back. She’s also probably glad to have her own brain again, although the astral plane is a pretty big place.” They can both feel the connection thrumming in their veins, an undercurrent of emotion in sync with the engine. Keith has a vision of Shiro piloting the black lion, and again his heart’s overflowing. 

Shiro heads forward to the instrument panel to contact the team. Lance asks after Shiro, and Shiro stands next to Keith to answer the transmission himself. Apparently, all four paladins have been calling the Black Lion to inquire after Shiro’s state of health for the past three days, and Keith hasn’t been able to give them any news--until now. 

For the next couple days, Keith still serves as guardian angel with Krolia as co-guardian, but the role is less defined. On the fourth day, Shiro regains his appetite on Keith’s watch, and he is starving. Keith is glad because with the tiny amount of food they’d been feeding him, he was starting to worry, and he could hear Shiro’s stomach rumbling for the last hour. 

Keith has an estimate of how long it’s going to take them to reach Earth, but he doesn’t know for sure. After this, he needs to speak with Allura and Hunk about ration plans. Striker is eating him out of lion and home.

To Shiro, he says: “You’re hungry? That’s great. What do you want?” 

It happens when they go to eat. Krolia is asleep with Striker in the chamber behind the cockpit, having said after the first day that she doesn’t like sitting in Black’s chair, and separated from them by a pair of double doors. Keith knows that you don’t make confessions without consequences, and he is ready to handle every single one. 

Keith leads Shiro over to the supply crates where everything is still packed in boxes. He’s never been the best at identifying space food, but he can tell them apart if he calls them by Earth-flavor. “We have chicken flavor, potato flavor, cheese flavor, one that ‘tastes like Altea’--” down further in the box, he finds a green package “--this one just tastes like leaves--”

Shiro pulls him in with a hand on the back of Keith’s neck and kisses him. Keith kisses back with everything he has, and he fears he must be messy and sloppy, because he’s never done this before, and he worries that Shiro can tell. He considers pulling back but he holds on and lets Shiro pull away, taking everything he needs first. 

“Are we okay?” Shiro asks. 

Keith thinks it’s enough, but then he realizes Shiro is still standing in front of him, and it doesn’t make sense why he’s not kissing him, so he kisses him again, and again, and again, although they’re both breathing heavily.

Shiro’s tongue slides into his mouth, and he slows down to drink it in. They are pulling at each other languidly, and Keith’s head tingles so much he almost feels dizzy. 

_You are my world_ , he wants to say, but he can’t because Shiro’s tongue caressing his feels so good so instead he thinks it fiercely as he tastes Shiro’s teeth. _You are my world, and I lost you._

“You love me,” Shiro gasps, eyebrows pinched upwards and eyes just as wide as they were on that forsaken platform.

He wants to get lost in Shiro, but he thinks he already is.

“I do. I love you,” Keith says, resting a hand on his temple. “I didn’t know if you would remember.”

“It’s hazy. Some of the memories I have are mine, and some are his. They’re coming back one by one.

“Look, Keith,” Shiro says, stabilizing him with a hand on his shoulder, “I know I was dying, and I just kissed you, but before we do anything I want you to be sure that this is what you really want.”

Keith squints as if he’s trying to see through a brick wall. “We literally just sucked face. How could you think I want something different? Unless you don’t want it. But you kissed me.”

“I think it’s fair enough to say we both want it.”

“Say it back.”

“Wh-Keith, you can’t just ask someone to do that. It defeats the point.”

“So, you’re not going to say it.” 

“This isn’t romantic enough.”

“Oh, so you were waiting for a romantic moment? Do you know how often those happen?”

Keith rifles through the crates without finding any evidence of blankets, but he is determined to have them, so he contacts Pidge with the intention of borrowing hers. If they’re not landing on a planet, this involves a complex maneuver wherein Keith ejects while they are flying in formation next to Green so that he can enter the green lion, grab the blankets, and be snatched back up when Green abandons him to space. Shiro operates Black throughout, but he doesn’t fly.

Keith lays the blankets on the floor in front of the starboard skylight so he and Shiro can watch the stars: two layers, one for padding and one to cover themselves when they go to sleep. Keith removes his suit and the sweat of a few days while Shiro does the same, and they climb in. It feels freeing to be down again to one layer of breathable dry fit.

Far outside the window, white specks pass by as if they are hanging suspended. There is a fragility in Keith’s chest, a dove that flutters and with whose captivity he is unfamiliar.

“Shiro?” he asks. “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I always thought I would be the first one to say ‘I love you.’”

“How long have you known?”

“Probably since we left the shack.

“That long ago?”

“Yeah.”

He tells how, through days of sparring and hoverbikes and Arizona sunsets, bruised knees and higher-ups and the day Keith started calling him “sir,” although he wasn’t sure how he felt about it at the time. Only then do they touch the parts that are less certain, the recent spots that are black holes in Shiro’s reality.

Shiro lays out his memories so far so Keith can fill in the gaps, while also relating the snippets of their lives he caught from the astral plane. Keith feels pain as he talks about the fight, and Shiro knows it’s not him but he can still feel the impact of the blade as he brings it down to bear on Keith, the staggering force of pure energy that shoots straight up his arm before he looks down to aim right at Keith in a muscle memory he cannot forget. They are not Shiro’s memories, but Shiro sees through his eyes.

Keith cradles Shiro’s head and kisses him slowly. Then he tells him that no matter what he remembers, the team is still out there. They are here to fight another day.

Shiro remembers a purple light, and a weird amount of time spent carrying Lotor. They laugh, and Shiro traces Keith’s bicep and kisses him again. He trails kisses down Keith’s jaw as he reminisces on the good things, some good times that he spent with the team, because even though Kuron couldn’t lead worth shit, it isn’t all bad. Keith laughs, a low rumble when Shiro reaches the hollow of his throat, and rests his chin on Shiro’s head.

He runs a hand down Keith’s flank to the back of his thigh when he tells of using Black to save Keith and the clone before they fell.

He remembers frequent headaches, but takes hope from the thought that every time he wasn’t there, the team pulled through without him. 

“Of course, I still have my memories from the astral plane,” Shiro rumbles, having pulled the collar aside to leave bites on Keith’s shoulder. “You led Voltron.”

Keith preens and drags a finger down the valley of Shiro’s pectorals. “Yeah, that felt great. Oh man, I haven’t even told you about Lotor yet.”

“Okay, what’s that full story?”

“Dude went off the rails.”

Black is beeping.

“Before you elaborate--” Shiro takes the hand on his chest in his left before Keith can make it over to a nipple, which is awful because he was so _close_ \-- “We’re almost at the edge of our solar system.” He looks up to the sky and then to the cockpit window, as if he’s looking for something. Keith looks at the hand Shiro has in his, possibly going cross eyed.

The message comes. They hear the team cheering in the background.

“We made it.” Keith smiles softly.

“We did.” Then Shiro’s voice comes out in an avalanche of words: “I was going to wait until we got back to Earth to do this, but I can’t wait any longer. When I died, I never thought I would see our home planet again. But most of all, more than all these planets and stars, I missed _you_ , because you were always the best part of my life, even when I was saving you from discipline.

“I love you, Keith.”

Keith places a hand over his mouth and checks to make sure he’s still standing on solid ground. He whimpers, but Shiro hugs him close, and he will later deny that he made a sound that embarrassing. He hides in Shiro’s chest, but he is grinning so hard his face hurts. 

“Is this romantic?” Keith giggles. Shiro just sighs and Keith imagines that internally he is shaking his head in disappointment. 

“Yes. Come on, let’s get in bed.”

Keith does that, pulling the thin blankets up over his shoulders and part way over his face to shield his eyes from the ethereal glow. Shiro crawls in next to him. He wants to go to sleep, but he notices that Shiro is still propped up on his elbow, studying an object in the distance. 

Keith is tired, but he supposes he can have one more moment of stargazing, before bed. Outside the window, he looks. They are still at a distance and it is not Earth, but Pluto in the background.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shiro uses saturn's rings to propose don't @ me


End file.
